Review: Ruby McCollister: Tragedy

Sunset Boulevard for jaded millennials, Ruby McCollister's Fringe debut is an entertainingly delirious, stream-of-consciousness, overtly theatrical stumble through the seamy underside of Hollywood's live fast, die young allure. A tragedian to her always performative bones, she grew up hanging around the low-rent Los Angeles theatre where her father was manager. Here, she was surrounded by, and thirstily absorbed the glamorous ghosts of stage and screen, most of whom had been destined to expire in obscurity. But some, like Marilyn Monroe and Karen Carpenter, became exemplars of the tragic idol. And all were McCollister's role models.

Experimenting with being-seen socialising, recreational drugs and eating disorders from a prodigiously early age, she nevertheless met her romantically nihilistic match in a French exchange student when she swapped everything but her intense personality to go study in Vermont. Flirting with genuine disaster and the base desires of her similarly affected Gallic squeeze, these people are absolutely exhausting to hear of. But you can't quite tear your ears away from the approaching calamity.

In song and wry, if melodramatically over-the-top soliloquy, McCollister is a wild-eyed, luminescent figure, quite aware of how ridiculous and self-obsessed she appears. Still, she's furiously dedicated herself to wringing maximum empathy and a fair few laughs out of the still twitching, beautified corpse of her youth.